Marketing By the Numbers | Your Brand is Calling

Marketing By the Numbers | Your Brand is Calling

Marketing By Numbers

Step number one: sign up to social media site. Done. Step number two: create unique, yet appropriately catchy business handle that aptly coincides with my company. Yep – got it. Step number three: add appropriate social buttons to blog, website, other social sites, email and any other available area. I’m so on that. Step number four: bribe, harass, persuade and otherwise entice people to share, follow and fan. Social media engagement accomplished.

(crickets chirp into the vast, endless silence of social engagement fail)

Marketing By the Numbers: Statistical Failures

Numbers. Data. Statistics. For many CEOs, CFOs, CMOs and other upper echelons of business – not to mention the entire middle management sector – numbers mean things. Which numbers mean what things is open to interpretation, depending on the person. Two plus two, for example, could equal a whole bunch of fours or a plummeting bottom line.

Here’s the thing about numbers and statistics. A lot of it is guesswork. Let’s look at these statistics, torn from the creative graphic imagery of Wildfire Apps. In a survey of 700 marketers:

97% believe social media marketing benefits their business (note how, in the numbers below, it adds up to way more than 100%? This was a multiple choice question, ya’ll):

88% by growing brand awareness

85% by engaging in dialogue

58% by increase sales and partnerships

41% by reducing costs

94% use Facebook for:

New customer recruitment (44%)

Higher conversion rates (18%)

More frequent purchases (18%)

These are mighty impressive numbers, right? Right. Because, like, 700 marketers out of 878,000+ marketers on LinkedIn, for example, will give an adequate representation of how the whole marketing world looks at things, yes? Yes – because that’s how statistics work.

So many people

Statistics follow this sort of roundabout logic. Survey says 97% of 700 marketers, or 679, think SMM has business benefits. Therefore, “97% of marketers believe in the business benefits of SMM.” In other words, when this survey is quoted, those quoting leave out “of 700 marketers” and use a blanket statement.

That’s a big leap when you’re reading statistics to decide what to do with your business. I’m not so sure I’d want to base my entire marketing decisions on leaps like this. I think, in fact, that I’d want to look at other numbers.

Adding the Right Numbers Together

Marketing by the numbers isn’t wrong, but you have to make sure they’re the right numbers. While statistical averages and percentages may be a shot in the dark, actual data isn’t. The 2011 Internet data provided by Pingdom in January 2012, for instance:

300 million websites were added to the Internet in 2011

There are 2.1 billion internet users worldwide and over 800 million of them are on Facebook

In other words, a whole bunch of people are on Facebook and Twitter, Lady Gaga knows some things about marketing that any marketer would give their right arm to understand, a lot of people are mobile and YouTube is hot.

Your Brand Is Calling You

What are you doing about it? -And whatever you’re doing, are your efforts “brand friendly”? While you’re chasing after wispy statistical information, are you making sure your current activities are branded? Yes? Wonderful! Are you sure?

I’d like you to do this exercise for me:

Go to your website.

Find your Twitter button.

Share a post with the Twitter button.

Visit your Twitter timeline and view your recent post.

First, could you find your Twitter button easily? Would anybody else be able to if they didn’t know where it was? Wonderful. Now, what does your recent post look like? Does it:

Have your user name (RT @level343) or does it say:

Via @sharethis

Via @addthis

Via @wordpress

Include hashtags for easy search, find and brand discovery?

Include a logo or “face” of the company?

If you can say yes to these, excellent! Now what about your other social networks? After all, you’ve spent all that time tracking down the statistics to tell you that social networking is important, so you probably have a few. What do they look like?

Your Brand Matters

Logo across all networks

Brand colors when possible

Connected to other networks when possible

Visible from your site or blog

Human generated content (rather than obviously bot generated)

Filled out profiles when possible

With each and everything you do online, whether it’s on your website, a social network, a guest blog or any other place, you need to keep your brand in mind. Follow the bullet points and check your social networks. Check your business profiles, author bios, business accounts and everything else you can think of.

When you’re looking at the Internet as a way to grow your business, you can’t afford to follow statistics only. Use them as a guide, but then take the time to test. What will do your business good – more so than any statistic and number – is making sure every endeavor has the highest possibility of return: if not in business sales, in authority and publicity.

International SEO consultant is my title...but who cares about those? What I love is, writing about marketing, social, SEO, relevance, ruffling feathers and starting revolutions. What you read on this blog, will hopefully inspire you to continue the conversation. When I'm not multitasking around Level343 I sneak away and go sailing. I'm crazy about pistachios, and of course Nutella.

Are you saying that we can add our logo to a tweet? Now that I’ve taken a new in-house position where branding across channels is possible and the org has outstanding imagery and stories to share, I’ll be sure to check this list against our website.

Hello Nicolette, sorry for not getting back to your question right away. It’s been crazy around here. To answer your question, you can add your brand (@company name) to your Twitter/FB account. I know of another community network Triberr that allows you to use your brand in RT’s you send out. These things as you know are very important. Too many people forget the importance of the small things.

Hi Gabriella,
didn’t know that there are almost 1 mil. marketeers on Linkedin, thanks for such an insightful article about branding. Unfortunately many tend to forget or minimalise the importance of branding in this virtual world.
Ben